The Top 25 WiiWare Games

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Which one made it to the top?

By Lucas M. Thomas

Can you believe it's been two years since we last did this? It's certainly overdue. Nintendo's WiiWare service has been slowly and steadily supplying under-the-radar excellence ever since May of 2008, and we haven't advised you of our top picks in a classic countdown form since two summers ago. Well, we're correcting this oversight today. These are the top 25 games of WiiWare.

Before we get started, though, some clarification about the selection process -- I wanted to feature as many great WiiWare games as possible, and so that means joint ranking for sequels and series. Mega Man 9 and 10? Sharing a spot. Nintendo's Art Style games? All ranked as one. You may agree or disagree with the decision, but it lets us showcase a lot more variety than just having every other game be a different BIT.TRIP installment.

So check it out! It's WiiWare, ladies and gentleman. The best of the best, right now.

We kick off our countdown with an impressive WiiWare-exclusive puzzler. The Magic Obelisk tells the light-hearted, fanciful tale of a young tree spirit named Lukus who's on a quest to put down roots. If he ever lets even a bit of sunlight touch him, though, his journey will be over -- he'll be frozen in place, his adventure over right on the spot. So it's up to you to manipulate towering obelisk objects in each environment to create shadow-covered safe zones for Lukus to walk through. You build protected paths of darkness for him to cross and ultimately come to the final, chosen spot where he'll finally root himself into the ground. If you liked Capcom's Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, this charming puzzler serves as an excellent follow-up to it.

WiiWare has become a wonderland for puzzle game junkies over the past few years, and Nintendo's own first-party efforts have been some of the most memorable in the genre. Maboshi's Arcade was an earlier release from the company, arriving in the Wii Shop just under the wire in the service's first calendar year -- and it was an oddly compelling mixture of three game designs in one. The title tasks you to play "Circle," directing a spinning disc around enclosed arenas; "Line," controlling a spinning stick and launching flying pegs; and "Square," where you direct a cursor to set fire to blocks before they scroll off the screen. The challenge is in jumping back and forth between each of the three, which are all active on the same screen at the same time -- it's a pretty wild concept. And Nintendo must have liked its individual components a great deal, too, because one of them ("Square") was given its own standalone release on DSiWare as the inventive and addictive Flametail.

Shin'en is a company well known for pushing the limits of every piece of hardware they develop for, and WiiWare got an exclusive title from them that did just that in the summer of 2010. Jett Rocket is like the Super Mario Galaxy of WiiWare, a visually brilliant 3D platformer that looks so good it's hard to believe it's just a downloadable title and not a full retail release. Its gameplay backs up its graphics, too, with a fun romp featuring massive boss battles, a variety of vehicles to ride and a smiling dolphin wearing a metal helmet. The adventure's a bit on the short side, but Jett Rocket impresses through its entire duration. Here's hoping Shin'en keeps up its envelope-pushing attitude on Nintendo platforms for many more years to come.

I expected to see a lot more of Nintendo's famous franchises show up with digital spin-offs or sequels when WiiWare was first unveiled years ago, but the service has turned out to be much more focused on original IPs than much of anything from Mario, Zelda, Metroid or the rest of the main brand bunch. Excitebike is one fairly high-profile Nintendo series that did get the expected treatment, though, with the release of World Rally in 2009. It served as kind of a remake of the original NES Excitebike game and also a bit of a sequel, modernizing the graphics of the classic side-scrolling racer but keeping the gameplay firmly rooted in the foundation of the past. I'd love to see Nintendo take this same approach with a few other vintage hits from their back catalog before WiiWare goes away for good, too -- but, alas, my hopes for Ice Climber 2 still seem unrealistic.

The biggest brand name release to launch alongside the WiiWare service itself was undoubtedly Final Fantasy, though My Life as a King is probably not the kind of experience most players were expecting to come from the Final Fantasy franchise. It's a city-management/simulation design instead of a traditional RPG, casting you in the role of a youthful monarch who's in charge of selecting citizens to complete jobs for a growing village. Players who got over the shock of the genre switch soon discovered that My Life as a King was one of the deepest and most engaging WiiWare launch titles, and the game sold well enough to inspire the release of a follow-up -- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord -- one year later. (Though it, too, completely swapped genres to become more of a tower defense design.)